WELCOME TO MY GAMEJAM SUBMISSION...SpaceHockey, it is an adaptation of the popular tabletop sport AIR HOCKEY. I am honestly not the biggest fan of most tabletop games, so I thought to myself what do I enjoy, this led to me thinking about air hockey...a game I thoroughly enjoyed as a kid whenever I might get to go to an arcade, etc. In my version, you and an opponent battle it off to protect your planet's atmosphere from the BIG RED BOMB trying to enter it...each player can deflect the bomb back over the border towards the opponent's atmosphere to try and score a point. Pretty simple concept! (It is designed for 2 players, can be 1 if you want ;)
This game was made entirely using the pygame library with python 3, this was my first game I have ever made and the pygame library gave me a great introduction into not just the coding side of game development, but the process as a whole, which I found very enriching. Yes the bugs were a pain and I did have to do a lot of research into how to use the various different functions like clock, display functions such as blit and an intro to using classes, but the satisfaction I got from seeing my little spaceships move, for example, was great. The collisions aspect of SpaceHockey is arguably the most integral part of the game, but proved to be a challenge to figure out, this was a great way of seeing how maths was applicable to game development, and I found it very inspiring once I had been able to apply it to my project. A lot of credit can be given to this video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVGTZlnnX3U (39:00-59:00), he was making a similar game in concept to mine and a lot of the techniques were entirely applicable to my project. The music handler was also a pretty new and exciting experience I had when finishing off the project, in school we don't get to play around with such fun little modules like the mixer method in pygame. When I first implemented my code and pressed m in the game window, and got to hear that really upbeat music I was super excited, it is still kind of buggy but still an enjoyable thing for me to see pay off somewhat. Credit for the music: [email protected]. If you want to have some real fun...why not play around with some of the source code! Change things like MAX_VEL in the Ball class, which will determine ball speed, BALL_RADIUS if you want to change ball size, download some other .mp3 files and add to the assets folder for a different type of vibe. (Make sure to change path for pygame.mixer...near top of code)
Any assets like imagery and music was taken from https://opengameart.org/, a wesbite with fantastic open-source assets for game development if you want to have a look!
YELLOW SHIP:
- WASD Config
RED SHIP:
- Arrow key Config
Music:
- Press m (on/off)
Note: Music cannot be turned on/off if ships are moving, this is because other functions are being called on and the music handler cannot be reached.
If you want to play my game follow this process... Download the source code zip in releases, this has everything bundled nicely together ready for you to play with.
Note: Ensure you have pygame installed on your machine